Hear the Indigo Girls Perform ‘Closer to Fine’ in 2002 — Two Decades Before the ‘Barbie’ Boom
Back in 2002, just a few weeks after releasing their album Become You, the Indigo Girls appeared on Mountain Stage, the long-running nationally syndicated radio show based in Charleston, West Virginia.
Towards the end of their set, the duo delivered a lovely rendition of “Closer to Fine,” already the band’s signature song, decades before it would gain a new audience by its appearance in Greta Gerwig’s pink-hued blockbuster Barbie.
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“Mountain Stage is a fantastic eclectic show, and we’ve loved playing it over the years,” the Indigos’ Amy Ray and Emily Saliers said in a statement, “especially because we got to share the stage with world class musicians and singers hootenany style.”
In recent years, well before Barbie, the Indigo Girls have been receiving overdue recognition for their legacy of trailblazing music in the Eighties and Nineties. “The Indigo Girls were a revolutionary, legendary musical duo that have delved into areas of production, harmony, vocalization, musicality, rhythm,” Brandi Carlile wrote in Rolling Stone in 2021, “and have been at times in their career utterly rejected by mainstream music and the press for their queerness, and just their lack of adherence to gender and traditional understandings of what they should look like and how they should be.”
As for “Closer to Fine,” the song has had an entirely new resurgence over the past year, with a marked uptick in streams after Barbie‘s release.
“It’s a positive song,” Saliers told Rolling Stone back in 1989, shortly after its release. “It’s possible that in the future we’ll be writing more songs with comic relief, but we’ve just been writing what we felt.”
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